PlayTZX

[TMD2003]

Does anyone know what the latest version of PlayTZX is, or where to get it?

The only versions I can find are Tomas Kac's originals from 1990-something, which require DOSBox and not a Windows command prompt - or Unix versions, which have to be hand-compiled, and my greatest ever achievement with hand-compilation was making the LAME command line work on Ubuntu in 2007 - everything else I've tried to hand-compile has spat back an error message at me which I don't understand.

But there must have been some kind of improvement in Tomas' originals from way back in the day, because - surely - this is what a TZXDuino uses, and would software written in 1990-something have a chance of running on a modern Raspberry Pi?

Furthermore, if I've got my facts right, the Pi has a RISC processor. I am fairly sure that the cheap Chinese CnMbook I've had kicking around doing very little since 2009 also has a RISC processor - and hence, a version of PlayTZX compiled for the Pi has a chance of running on the CnMbook as well. It runs... some idiosyncratic version of Linux that may only have existed in China in 2009 (language choice is English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, and that's your lot), or that was modified to suit the CnMbook. I've always thought it was possible to use it as an improvised TZXDuino, so if anyone's got a Pi or other RISC machine that runs a Unix-based OS and knows how to compile (and more importantly, how to compile without throwing up any errors, which is well above my station), do tell me.

[PeterJ]

I can compile this for Debian / Ubuntu if it helps @TMD2003

https://github.com/kounch/playtzx

@kounch is a member here, so may be he can provide you with a pre--compiled version. On that GitHub page there is a link to download the binary, but it's broken.

Are you running a relatively recent version of Linux?

I'm not an expert on architectures, but I would assume your cheap and ancient Chinese laptops CPU won't be compatible with a modern ARM based CPU.

I just use VMWare Player on my Windows box and spin up Linux VMs as I need them. You need plenty of RAM and a beefy CPU for that though.

[Patrik Rak]

Does anyone know what the latest version of PlayTZX is, or where to get it?

Unless you need PlayTZX as such, you can also use the PZX Tools and do

Code: Select all

tzx2pzx file.tzx | pzx2wav | play

or something along those lines.

Patrik

[TMD2003]

Now there's something I hadn't thought of. By and large I've completely ignored the PZX format because I see very little need for it. But still, if it works...

Does a pipe work in DOS or is that Unix-only?

[Pegaz]

Now there's something I hadn't thought of. By and large I've completely ignored the PZX format because I see very little need for it. But still, if it works...

Does a pipe work in DOS or is that Unix-only?

Well, I thought the same, until I saw how useful it is to load original tape images, with various custom schemes, on zx-uno.
Its less demanding to implement and has performed very well.
I also used some of Patrik's conversion tools, they are very reliable.
Highly recommend it.